Attitudes Toward English as a Global Language in India: Ideologies, Aspira-tions, and Educational Implications
Authors-Anira Furtado, Pyarelal Singh
Keyword-English as a global language, language attitudes, India, multilingualism, language ideology.
English plays a special role in India as an international language that is linked to economic mo-bility, social status, and international connectivity, and at the same time, raises issues related to the linguistic inequality, culture marginalization, and education stratification. English is both a language and also a resource in the multilingual and postcolonial context of India where it serves as a regulating means of communication as well as being a strong, social, and symbolic tool. This paper is an analysis of the attitude of using English language as a global language in India by incorporating perceptions of sociolinguistics, language policy and educational research. The study uses a mixed-methods approach to conduct research using both quantitative survey and qualitative approaches to semi-structured interviews and national policy documents that are considered relevant to this field of research. In such a manner, the English perception is explored in a subtle way in terms of various social, regional, and educational settings. According to the quantitative results, the instrumental orientation towards English is evident as the respondents only demonstrated a high level of connection of the English proficiency with the employability, academic achievement, and international engagement. Meanwhile, qualitative evidence also points to the presence of ambivalent attitudes, such as the fears of the marginalization of indige-nous and regional languages, disproportional access to good education in English, and the ten-sion with identity. As the results reveal, attitudes toward English in India are marked with a simultaneous impression of inspiration and anxiety as it is a representation of greater contradic-tion existing in globalization and multilingual societies. In as much as English is the language of opportunity, its supremacy upholds social inequalities and language dominances. At the end of the study, it is concluded that there is a need to implement language policies and pedagogical strategies that would strike the right balance between English learning and significant emphasis on multilingual education that would allow promoting equity, inclusivity, and linguistic justice in India.